I was once taken to a Travelodge on a second date. We didn’t get a room, you understand. The guy actually rang ahead and reserved a table – an actual table – in the restaurant of a Travelodge, less than two miles from my house. Right there, beside the display table of cereal boxes and selection box of teabags. When we went to the bar and were asked for our room number, he looked the person serving us straight in the eye and said “We don’t have a room. We’ve just come for the ambience.” I was standing beside a stationery salesman from Newcastle, under fluorescent blue strip lights, holding a tepid glass of rosé. It was pretty bloody ambient.
Like all great things, Travelodge was knocked into existence just a few short months after my parents failed comprehensively to navigate contraception. Or to quote their (Travelodge’s – even my parents didn’t go this far) heart-stopping press release: “Guests have enjoyed an estimated 880m hours of sleep, 50m sausages and 10,950 sunrises and sunsets since Britain’s first budget hotel opened – the “Burton A38 (northbound) Travelodge in 1985.” That makes 2015 our 30th anniversary, and I for one intend to celebrate it with a wall-mounted box of shower gel and a mug-sized plastic kettle.
In many ways, Travelodge and I are twins – both frequently found in the light industrial areas on the outskirts of town, both a huge fan of thrift, both with a solid appreciation for mass-produced soft furnishings and both overlooked by people on the quest for something “special”. But just like launderettes, the Pumpkin Cafe, bike sheds and pound shops, Travelodge is that most wonderful thing – not special.
It is the great British social leveller. Everyone has stayed in a Travelodge at some point. You might be delivering your children to university, crawling back after your best friend’s wedding, breaking up a car journey from Cardiff to Glasgow, going to some corporate conference for work, picking up your grandmother’s ashes or having the kind of affair that is best served beside an A-road with two plastic strips of instant coffee. Whatever the reason, this is where you’ll lie. Because Travelodge is where you stay when you think you’re not staying anywhere.
It’s the glorious anonymity of these roadside bunkers that gets me. If I ever get round to writing a great novel, I will do so sitting in an airless magnolia room in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Huddersfield, with nothing but a maroon strip of wallpaper and a nylon carpet. I cannot think of anywhere more inspiring, more electrifying, more ripe with possibility. Did you know that you can book three adults into a double room on the Travelodge website as standard? The wonderful, British, unflappable, end-of-the-pier, a-nod’s-as-good-as-a-wink-to-a-blind-horse filth of it. Of course, these days “budget” hotels like Travelodges are popping up like mushrooms. Premier Inns, Ibis, Novotel, Holiday Inn. But I don’t want to be premier. And, whatever the calendar says, this is not a time for inns.
I spent one of the happiest nights of my life in a Travelodge on the edge of Halifax. Of course it’s bittersweet that one of that city’s great satanic mills had been turned over from manufacturing to the nebulous industry of clean sheets and breakfast muffins, but I had a whale of a time lying diagonally across my mattress in a pair of work boots, drinking hot chocolate and watching Come Dine With Me. I’d probably be there now if I’d only packed enough knickers.
Talking of knickers, you may be wondering what happened to the man who took me to that Travelodge. The man who got me drunk on cheap rosé (seriously, a glass of that stuff cost less than a packet of Pringles) and childhood anecdotes. The man who sat me on a moulded plastic chair beneath a widescreen television on a Wednesday night, surrounded by the smell of microwave curry and disinfectant. The man who offered to steal a stack of paper napkins as we rolled out into the midnight air. Well, dear reader, I took him home.
And you’ll never guess where he’s taking me for my birthday.
